Rebecca Brown - Inventing Childhood

About Rebecca Brown

Rebecca Brown is the author of 10 books, including "The Last Time I Saw You," "The End of Youth," "The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary," "The Terrible Girls," "Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary," "The Gifts of the Body," and "Woman in Ill Fitting Wig," a collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer (www.pistilbooks.net). She has also written the libretto for "The Onion Twins," a dance opera; and a play, "The Toaster," and is engaged in an ongoing project involving altered texts. Her work is translated into Japanese, German, Danish and Norwegian and widely anthologized. She is creative director of literature at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington (www.centrum.org) and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Goddard College in Vermont. She lives in Seattle.

Rebecca wrote the following piece for "Telling Childhood" at Richard Hugo House on Oct. 13, 2006

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Inventing Childhood
By Rebecca Brown

I think I was nostalgic as a child. Even before I knew that word, I had this sense that the best was already over with.

I remember one Christmas when I was little-I don't remember exactly how old-my sister and I were given matching baby dolls for Christmas. They weren't fancy, the way some of the dolls they were starting to make in those days were. They didn't talk if you pulled a string or wet themselves if you put water in their mouths. Their arms and legs didn't move and their eyes didn't open and close and they weren't the size of real, actual babies. They were dolls-maybe six or eight inches long, of soft beige plastic with painted-on eyes and hair, brown for my sister's, blonde for mine.

What I do remember exactly is how I felt when we got the dolls. I loved the fact that my sister's and my dolls were not fancy, that our mother was acting as if these simple dolls would be enough for us. I loved, but was also sad, that as matching dolls, they were meant to suggest a closeness between my sister and me that we had never had.

I knew kids who dressed in matching clothes and I also knew that unless there was something wrong with them, they would not keep doing that when they were older. There was something about being little that allowed you to dress alike but whatever that thing was, it would go away when you grew up. Something would happen and you wouldn't want to be like your brother or sister or anyone in your family.

My sister is seven years older than I, and if she was still young enough to have been given a baby doll, she couldn't have been more than nine or ten, which would have made me two or three. And while she liked playing with dolls, she did not like being paired with me. I didn't liked playing with dolls that much, but I remember wanting my sister and me to play with these dolls together so that we could make our mother happy.

My mother had read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to us and there was that part when their grandfather or somebody brings the kids oranges for Christmas. The kids were thrilled with the oranges. They didn't know whether to eat them immediately or to save them. We, on the other hand, had oranges all the time in Florida, and nothing any of us had meant half as much as those oranges did to the Laura Ingalls Wilder kids.

I don't remember ever playing with those poor dolls together, but now, after years of hating how she treated me, I can look back and sympathize with my sister. When she was born, my sister was her mother's only child, her princess, her adored. My father was not around for the birth, but when he did finally see his firstborn he was proud. Like most men in the '40s and '50s, he didn't know what to do with a baby and watched in awe as his young wife took care of it. Then, as was his pattern for years, he went away again with the Navy. When he came home on leave, my mother met him eagerly, excited to see him and show him the growing baby. But most of my mother's time was spent without him and most of my sister's first year of life she had her mother to herself. Then, about a year after my sister, my brother came along. With his second child, my father was less puzzled. After the kid grew up a bit, he'd be able to do boy things with him like hunting and fishing. Though my sister was still her mother's little girl, she was no longer her only child. She'd been supplanted.

My father's visits home were special occasions. He'd talk to his wife about exotic, foreign places he'd been, with names like Tripoli and Lisbon, Cartagena. He talked of minarets and palaces, gondolas and the Alps and said some day he'd take her there. She hoped some day he would. His wife cooked him his favorite food and talked about the kids: how they were sleeping through the night, then walking, talking, potty trained. She talked about the house: how she had rigged a clothesline when the dryer broke or had fixed a leaky sink.

One of the things my father had to learn in the Navy was photography, and to finish his course he had to make a portfolio. Some of the men shot photos of the wilderness or airplanes, sports. My father took pictures of his wife and kids and put them in an album that my mother kept for years. In the pictures, my mother's skin is smooth and her hair is long and dark. In the one particular photo I am thinking of, my brother and sister are sitting on the couch on either side of her and our mother is reading to them. They're all engrossed, their faces bent over the book open in her lap. My sister is wearing a plaid dress with an apron and anklets, my brother a shirt and shorts and sandals. All of their cheeks are smeared with licorice-they all loved licorice-but they seem happily unaware of their messes. In this picture, my father regards his children and his pretty wife with love.

After several years, my father's touring with the Navy took its toll. My siblings knew their father only as a visitor and my mother adjusted to raising her kids alone, to being a woman who lived without a man. So when my father did come home, he came as an intruder.

How soon after my father took that picture of his wife and children on the couch did he start resenting them? When did he begin to feel his wife had turned from being a woman who adored him into a mother who cared only for her children? When did my father begin to feel, as my sister later did, that he had been supplanted?

When did my mother begin to feel that her husband cared more for his job than for his family? When did she begin to resent his expectation that his visits home were special occasions, "vacation" time in which to hunt and fish with his Navy pals, while she, vacationless, continued to maintain the house and children? When did they each begin to feel the other had betrayed them?

By the time I was born, a year or two after the licorice photo, my parents' good years were behind them. They had pushed one another as far away as they could while still staying married and were only biding time.

Did I somehow know this as a baby, then a child? Was knowing this the "cause" of my nostalgia?

I felt responsible for the dolls and for my mother, as if I knew that I, that we, her children had taken her husband away from her, and that she was only staying married to him for us, and in particular for the youngest child, me. Did I somehow want to fix for her the mess I had created by being born? Did I somehow reason that whatever happiness she might still have had something to do with some old idea she once had had of what a family was? How children were supposed to be? And that the last place this idea could be manifest was me?

I'm assuming there was some kind of "reasoning" in what I did or felt, but I don't know that. I can't remember what or if I thought or what I only think I thought in retrospect.

I started off this essay by saying I didn't remember how old I was when I got that doll and then I tried to work that out. But if I don't remember something as simple as a fact-how old I was-how can I remember what might have gone on inside me?

I know I don't remember right. Do I remember wrong?

Because another time when I visited her, and my mother and I were at some store shopping-I don't remember what store-for some snacks to take on a hike and I said, "How about some licorice," she said, "I can't stand licorice." I said, "You used to love it," and she said no, she never liked it.

"But what about the picture," I said, "the one with you and Bill and Betty on the couch, the one Dad took. Your mouth is smeared with it."

"No," my mother said, "You kids and your father loved it, but I've always hated licorice." When we got back to her apartment she got out the album and flipped to the photo and there it was, exactly not as I remembered. My brother's and sister's faces are smeared, but my mother's is perfectly clean.

"See?" she said. I had to, then, and think I sort of did.

But even now when I think of that picture, at first I see my mother's face smeared with licorice. Then I have to make myself remember what she told me and what I saw in the photo when I looked again, but I still can't see it right inside my head. I remember-or something-despite what is true, another thing that never, in fact, was.

I said I didn't remember exactly how old I was when I got that doll. I also don't remember how old I was when I stopped believing in Santa. I do remember it was on another Christmas Day, several years after the pair of dolls my sister and I were given, when I found, on one of the presents Santa was supposed to have left beneath our Christmas tree, a price tag. The present was a shooting gallery my mother would have gotten in an attempt to find me something in which our father might have an interest. The shooting gallery was cardboard, in a box cut out like a theater set and, attached by springs to the stage part on the bottom, were four cardboard ducks. The one with the most colors, I knew from what my father had told me about their markings, was a wood duck. There was also a mallard drake (shiny green head, purple flash on the side) and a hen (brown) and, I think, a teal (teal). You were supposed to shoot the ducks with the enclosed gun, which had darts with rubber suckers on the end that are supposed to, but didn't, stick to the ducks when you hit them. I found the price tag on the back of the box.

I hope I didn't act, when I showed my mother the price tag, as if I didn't know what it meant. I hope I didn't ask something designed to make me appear sweet and innocent like, "Did Santa forget to take off the price tag?" I think I suspected, even then, that my mother had purposely left the price tag on so that our family could finally admit that the Santa story we'd kept pretending we believed for one another was finally over.

I say I don't remember exactly when I stopped believing in Santa, but I remember the room I found the present in. It was the living room of our first house in Spain, and we were in that house only a year. We moved to Spain after the Navy finally gave my father a posting where he could live at home. I think my parents were hoping this posting, which would allow his family to share my father's life in an exotic foreign place, would help the marriage.

Some of the time my father worked on the Navy base but most of the time he worked downtown in Madrid. When we were new to Spain my mother, who had rarely left her native Oklahoma and never been abroad before, was keen on taking advantage of the learning opportunities afforded by being in a foreign culture. So, in addition to allowing us to go to bullfights, which she herself went to only once, she signed me up for flamenco lessons. My brother and sister, who were in high school and old enough to protest, didn't have to do anything like that. They were adamant about staying as American as possible-my sister in her bobby socks and penny loafers, my brother in his short-sleeved madras shirts and denim.

My flamenco teacher, a young, taut, dark-eyed, olive-skinned and scantily dressed dancer, came to our house to give me lessons. She came midday, when my father was home for lunch, and gave me my lesson in the living room while my father watched from where he ate. Despite my parents' encouragement, my lessons did not last. I was terrible at all of it-holding your hands in a perfect curve, your stomach flat and feet as straight as splints. I was also very bad at castanets.

Anyway, I remember those lessons were in the same room as where in December of that year we all stopped pretending like we believed in Santa Claus and also the same room we had all been in the November night our neighbor came over to tell us that the president had been shot.

We didn't believe him. Our neighbor, Mr. Bosch, was, according to my father, an embarrassment who could not hold his liquor. Mr. Bosch was also a Catholic and my father, who had always distrusted Kennedy for his Catholic-ness (his northern accent, his youthfulness, his politics and his hair) assumed that the teary-eyed Mr. Bosch was just shouting about some superstitious Catholic thing. My father walked the drunken, distraught Mr. Bosch around the block a couple of times then back to his house to sleep it off. But by the time my father came back to us, we were hearing on the radio-we didn't have a TV then-that the president had been shot and we had to believe it.

Of course I didn't understand all that the shooting meant. I doubt if any of us did. My father, even if he hated Kennedy, was a career military man who believed in the U.S. government and that it always could and would take care of its own. My brother and sister, who were starting to listen to music my father hated, believed the young good-looking president with a not bad haircut and a beautiful wife was going to make the world a cooler place. My mother, who'd idolized F.D.R. and still thought that the president, any president, was somehow above the rest of us, was devastated that a mere criminal could murder him.

Was this some kind of childhood end for all of us?

We came back to the states in 1966. My father served out a couple more years in the military, but then they piped him over. He floundered around at civilian life and the marriage finally ended. When my parents officially split in l969, they were the first people any of us knew who got divorced. Back then if you were married, you were supposed to pretend, even if you weren't, that you were happy. I know my parents also stayed married because they didn't want to have failed-at love, at family, at doing what you were supposed to. Plus, the practical reasons. Though my mother had gone to college and taught grade school, raising three kids on one income would have been tough. In any event, they waited until my brother and sister went off to college and I was in junior high.

By that time the sexual revolution and feminism were starting to happen and my brother and sister were taking drugs and M.L.K. and R.FK. and Malcolm X were murdered. But unlike when the president was shot, this time we saw these things ourselves. We saw the pictures in the newspapers and the clips on our TV: the black men on the motel porch pointing to where the bullets came from, Sirhan Sirhan in handcuffs and the flashbulb's glare, the body bags from Vietnam, dead soldiers' faces-"boys" they called them-on the evening news.

We saw these things ourselves this time and knew that everybody else was seeing them too. We could not not believe them then. We could not still pretend.

Then no one was a child anymore.